Filtering by Tag: bucket seats

You may be wondering the million dollar question...why are car seats designed so poorly if we sit in them so often? I wondered the same thing, and thought I'd do a little gallery of car interiors in the 20th century. I'm not a Ford® driver, but since they started making cars early on, it made it easiest to get pictures from 1904 and see how seats have changed. (Also take note that I am not a car person, by any means, so I have little technical info about cars.) Pay particular attention to how seats change, and the angle of seats over time.

1904 Ford

Notice how much leg room there is and how high the seat is. There is still a slight slope front to back, but there's a lot of room to sit upright.

1920 Ford

Still lots of legroom and not seat not too sloped.

1921 Bench Seat

This is a 1921 Model T bench seat, which is getting lower, but doesn't have the front bit higher than the back bit yet.

1930's Ford Coupe

Notice that the style of cars has changed, the car is lower to the ground, with the driver peeking above the window. This is partially what's led to our slouched car position.

1930's interior-not too sloped back yet.

Ford truck 1940's

Humans have been riding in cars with their heads forward and spines rounded for a long time!

Ford Fairlane, ca. 1950's

The lower the car, the more likely you are to have your knees above your hips.

Low cars have no room for your legs, except in front of you. To make room for your legs, the seat has to be angled knees above hips, otherwise, it's pretty awkward.

Ford Torino, 1970

Low car, no leg room!

Ford Torino Interior

These are souped up seats for the Torino-you can see that these are basically like a kid's car seat, but for grown ups. You pelvis is tucked, and the seats are so sloped you probably couldn't sit well if you tried!

1980's Ford Taurus

I just threw this in for fun. We had this growing up, and boy was it ugly.

1990's Ford Truck

You can almost image the passengers' heads hanging forward

Definitely the most comfortable of the bunch, I'd say. You could almost sit upright.

Ford Ranger, ca 2000

Here's the classic bucket seat, in all of its glory.

Starting position for the Pilates Roll Up/Roll Down. Notice the neutral spine. (www.mypilatesstyle.com)

So what are your conclusions? We can see that cars, over time, have gotten much lower to the ground, for better or worse. What that means is that there's less room for seats to be upright in the vehicle, forcing our seats to be angled backwards and our knees higher than our hips. It is possible to sit on your sitting bones with your knees higher than your hips, but it's really hard. If you drive a sportscar, or borrow someone else's, give it a shot. Try it on the floor.

This picture (quepolandia.com) shows a fairly well aligned spine in the yoga pose of boat. His head and neck look a teensy bit off, but that could be the lighting.

Placing your feet on the floor to start, sit upright on your ischial tuberosities. Then, start to lower your upper body back, but DON'T ROUND your spine. DON'T DO THIS right now- this is just for exploration. Can you keep your mid-upper spine just as tall as you lower body back? Or can you only round as you lower? That may be how you sit in your car, especially when you have seat support to prevent your muscles from firing appropriately. As you may recall from the first post (re: driving), we most often fall into the habit of slouching in our seats with our heads protruding forward, which is not great for our spines nor our necks, especially for musicians.

Somewhere down the line, we created the idea that sitting in a slouched position, with no muscles engaged and a big rounding in the spine = comfort. This then translated to cars in the 1940's and 1950's, and the rest is history. Comfort, in modern sitting, = poor alignment and muscles turned off. Comfort=potential long term back pain, muscle weakness, misalignment, and disc damage. These are all the same issues we battle when we sit in orchestra, or in any other situation. Seats on the train, airplane, subway, etc., are almost always bucket style, so take a look and start noticing how you sit, and more than that, try to sit less. Let's fight those slouchy seats, shall we, and find those ischial tuberosities!